Gedo Senki: Legend of Earthsea

Studio Ghibli is producing an anime version of Ursula K. LeGuin’s classic science fiction series, The Legend of Earthsea. It is being directed by Moro Miyazaki, son of the legendary Hayao.

For a fan of science fiction alone, this would be incredibly exciting news. As a fledgling otaku my anticipation can now extend along the anime axis as well! Of course there is no guarantee that the junior Miyazaki is as talented as the father, nor is there any guarantee that a piece of literature will survive the transition to film. Bicentennial Man was a real stab in the heart for Asimov purists, and I’ve ranted on the H2G2 movie before. But there are successes – witness the glory that was Blade Runner (an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). I think that the anime format suits the subject matter far better than live-action and have high hopes indeed.

Most of those high hopes being fed by what I’ve already seen of the film, of course. You can view the trailer as a Flash movie at Ghibli.net or at YouTube.

There’s also a production blog (translated by Nausicaa.net).

4 thoughts on “Gedo Senki: Legend of Earthsea”

  1. i wonder if they are going to make many of the characters brown or yellowfy them 🙂

  2. From the promotional materials, quite the reverse. Ged was brownish-red of skin in the books like almost every other character, Kargs excepted. Like the recent television miniseries, Studio Ghibli apparently plans to lighten skins generally.

    I am not aware of any anime series which has browned or yellowed an imported character; a common reaction of an anime viewer is surprise that the characters are not self-evidently Asian in appearance.

  3. a common reaction of an anime viewer is surprise that the characters are not self-evidently Asian in appearance.

    sure, but they aren’t necessarily european either.

  4. I was bitterly disappointed in the Sci-fi version because it was so far off from my beloved books. But….when the series was on sci-fi it blew away the competition for two nights.
    I can only surmise the vast quantities of viewers never read the books, and couldn’t be disappointed. >:-(

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